Other Information

In 2004, Canada's first ministers agreed to work toward reducing wait times for five priority areas: cancer treatment, cardiac care, diagnostic imaging, joint replacements, and sight restoration. The Canadian Institute for Health Information(CIHI) was
mandated to collect wait time information and monitor provincial progress in meeting national benchmarks. Alberta reports wait time information on the Alberta Wait Times Reporting website monthly and to CIHI annually.

Monthly wait time data for Alberta is reported based on a "Decision-to-Treat" calculation and can be found under Wait Time Trends. National efforts to align provincial wait times reporting are moving to "Ready-to-Treat" based measures as a more
accurate indicator of system performance. Ready-to-Treat is the date when a patient is medically, functionally, and socially ready to receive the scheduled surgery and provides a good proxy for removing patient unavailable time from the reported wait time.

The table below presents measures for Alberta Ready-to-Treat wait times for the period shown.